I can't believe how fast this summer has gone. It's slipped through my fingers, leaving me feeling a bit at a loss. I had hoped to have accomplished more...certainly to have written more. But for some reason, this summer I've found myself not at my most articulate. Words haven't come easily...and thus the relative lack of blogging.
Last week I had occasion to go back through some of my older posts, looking for something I wanted to send to a colleague, and I was disheartened by how much more interesting my writing used to be, compared to what I've generated recently.
I think the biggest problem this summer has been the limited amount of interaction I've had with others at MSR. With Lili away for the past month, I've spent too much time sitting by myself in my office, writing code (which, I must admit, has been fun--it's been a while since I've actually built something, even if it's just an internal site for tracking all the information associated with the social computing symposium) and dealing with email. The real work of putting on a good event is inviting the right mix of people--it's like holding a dinner party, but exponentially harder. So that's taken up more time than I really had intended.
There are a lot of things bubbling around in my head, though--having to do with two main themes. The first is the kind of semi-synchronous presence that tools like Twitter and Facebook have made so prevalent. The other is the extent to which work and play are (or could be, or should be) intertwingled.
In a week, I'll be aboard the Norwegian Pearl cruise ship, en route to Alaska. I'll be cut off from email and Internet and phone calls...and I can hardly wait. I'm hoping that the break with communication technology, combined with the grandeur of the Alaskan landscape, will help me focus my mind a bit, and knock loose whatever it is that's gumming up the works in my head.
After that, it's back to Rochester--we arrive home on August 27th, whereupon I'll be immediately caught up in start-of-year meetings (ack) and course prep. I'm teaching a course I love this fall--two sections of the introduction to multimedia and the web course--so prep won't be onerous and neither will teaching.
So there won't be much blogging 'til then...and after that, my hope is that quality and quantity of writing output will increase significantly.
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